Introduction

Hey everyone! I’m working on a new website, powered by Hugo. This new website will first run under the url hugo.randomodbuild.com and eventually I’ll change the www.randomodbuild.com domain to the new hugo site.

A Timeline

The Beginning

Over the years, I’ve had several websites, in various states of progress. I created a blogger website at randomodbuild.blogspot.com, and even a weebly website at randomodbuild.weebly.com, which are now both abandoned, and never really had any content in the first place. Finally, in 2019 I got started on my selfhosting journey.

First Self Hosted Site

While I self hosted many services on docker, my first ever public facing site with original content was at the url “littlecataloglfl.tk”. It’s purpose was to display the current books at a little free library, using a smartphone. It was an interesting idea for a required community service project in middle school. You can learn more about it here. This site is now at lib.randomodbuild.com, by the way. More on that later.

Covid and boredom

When the pandemic arrived, I found myself bored out of my mind. Since I had gained experience with self hosting wordpress on my docker stack, I thought, why not create a personal blog? Then I could document/share my projects, starting with my little free library. My blog was launched, first at “randomodbuild.tk”. I chose wordpress because I was familiar with it, and back then, its features were appealing to me.

Annoyance with Freenom.com

As you can tell, I was a big fan of .tk domains at this point. They were free, and I could register them for 12 months. As long as I checked in with them before they expired, canceled them manually, and then re registered, they worked fine. I would use cloudflare nameservers and got free HTTPS with their proxy. However, Freenom’s limitations were becoming increasingly annoying. First, cloudflare blocked API access to them, so using them in my docker stack was harder. Then, I accidentally forgot to cancel and renew before the expiration date, and when I went to register the library website again, Freenom was trying to charge me $10! I waited about a month and the price dropped back down to free, but it was still annoying. The library hadn’t been placed in public yet due to covid, so there was no service interruption. Eventually I realized that I should stop trying to cheap out and just pay for my own domain name. So I purchased randomodbuild.com. This turned out to be a good decision, as Freenom’s website stopped working completely soon after that (it was always finicky). And a few months ago, they shut down registration completely after being sued by meta. Something about getting money over the monetization of phishy links. Go figure, for a service that offers domains for free 🤣.

Migration to www.randomodbuild.com

I purchased the domain from namecheap initially, since I had experience with them. I later moved them to Cloudflare’s registrar since they were a few dollars cheaper each year (only $9.15!). My wordpress blog was now at www.randomodbuild.com.

DNS Rant

Now, something doesn’t sit right with me that DNS is effectively a monopoly. I pay ICANN money every year to basically rent digital property, and I don’t have any other choice🙃. This got me interested in Handshake for a while, as it would decentralize the root zone and offer true ownership of names. But until this sees widespread adoption (of course ICANN is not going to do something that would hurt their business), we’re stuck with the monopoly.

Realization

Soon I realized how overkill wordpress is. I’m tired of getting automated emails from my wordfence plugin, telling me something is wrong. Yes, I could disable these. But why should I need them in the first place? At the end of the day, this website is just a small collection of posts. There is no need for interactive content (except for comments, but that would imply that people actually read my blog🤣🤣), and everything else is simply an attack surface. In addition, I don’t feel like configuring wordpress to be faster. Yes, it may be possible to optimize a wordpress site for faster page loads. But this would be harder than switching to static. So, I began looking at static site generators.

CMS Woes

In my research of static site generators, I found many articles by people that went along the lines of “I had a blog, it was too overkill and inefficient, I switched to ssg x, and I loooooove markdown, it’s just text!!!” The thing is, I’m not too familiar with markdown. I’m young, and have used WYSIWYG editors my entire life. Adding images to a post in markdown seemed like a hassle. I stalled at this point for a long time, and my wordpress instance kept on ticking along. I liked the wordpress editor and CMS, but I also wanted the benefits of static sites. I wanted portability (being able to host nearly anywhere for cheap/free and not just clearnet), I loved the idea of using git for version control, but I wanted my easy GUI editor! Eventually I caved. I found FrontMatter and decided that, while not a full WYSIWYG experience, it would make using a SSG just tolerable enough to push me over the edge. And who knows, I’ll probably find a better workflow in the future to truly bring it on par with wordpress. One time, I made a post entirely on my phone using the iOS wordpress app! Not sure if I’ll ever be able to do that with Hugo, but we’ll see.

Present

Well, if you’ve read that far, congratulations. As I’m writing this post, the hugo site hasn’t been made public. That’ll change, but I’m not to familiar with git atm.

See ya!